Is America Becoming a Police State? The Disturbing Questions of ‘Do Not Resist’
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Duh? To ask the question is to answer it. This appears to be an interesting and generally unbiased documentary made by the son of a SWAT team commander. This is the single most important domestic issue in the United States at present, and one that transcends the usual boundaries of ideology, class, race, culture, religion, geography, etc. It is also true that the police state exists at every level, from localized municipal police and sheriff’s departments to state police agencies to corrections officials to federal law enforcement and homeland security agencies. There are presently about 1.5 million law enforcement agents in the United States, essentially an occupational army representing an imperialist plutocratic regime. Regrettably, there is virtually no opposition to the police state at present with the possible exception of very marginal groups such as the sovereign citizens. Even supposed anti-police state tendencies such as Black Lives Matter are just as likely to call for greater federal control over local police ostensibly for the purpose of enforcing civil rights, i.e. putting the mouse in charge of the cheese or the fox in charge of the chicken coop).

My perception of law enforcement was always very favorable—and I still have a favorable opinion of police officers,” he told The Daily Beast. “I have great respect for my father. Growing up, I had a very biased view of my dad as an officer, and I knew he had a great deal of integrity as an individual. I assumed that all police officers operated in the same way he did.”

Yet Atkinson’s new movie, Do Not Resist—opening Friday at New York’s Film Forum and later nationwide—shows that actually they don’t. It depicts local police departments deploying military-grade equipment, in many cases armored vehicles gifted by the Homeland Security and Defense departments direct from Iraq and Afghanistan, while using brute force to control, and occasionally abuse, economically depressed minority communities.